“After that four hundred years of stillness there came this amazing man, John the Baptist. He shocked their culture. He upset their theology.

Nobody’s going to church. Why? Their all going out to hear a man in the wilderness.

What’s he doing-raising the dead?

No, he isnt.

He’s raising hell.

Did he raise the dead? No he did not raise a dead man but he raised a dead nation. Dear Lord, we could do with a John the Baptist in every city of the nation tonight…

Oh, they loved to hear him because he believed in..but not only believed it but actually raised the dead.  The trouble with our theology, its all on the blackboard. Our theology is all in textbooks. It has no life, it has no breath, it has no power, it has no authority…

How in the world could Jesus stand in the middle of the crowd of angry vexed people? He’d antagonize them. He’d reveal their spiritual bankruptcy. They were just getting over the shock of John Baptist standing there in the wilderness. They couldn’t fathom it.

Why are people going?

Read the third chapter of Luke…even the Roman soldiers went…they were fascinated when they heard him.

Nothing like this in Rome, Caesar has nothing like this.

Here is a little strange man with a leather girdle wrapped around his loins and an old camel skin wrapped around his neck and people are swarming from everywhere…

He uses that nobody likes, “Repent…repent!” Not only confess your sin, forsake your sin, repent,  run away from it!

Then Jesus comes up afterwards…Don’t you think the next day after he turned water into wine that everywhere they were saying. “Didn’t you hear what he did? They ran out of wine last night and he turned water into wine.”

“This is the man that tosses people out of the synagogues…this is the man that kicks over the extortioners.

This is the man that says to learned men, “You are the enemies of God.”

Merciless.

We are preaching an acceptable gospel today, making it as painless as we can. All we do is give people a shot to put them to sleep so they’ll get to hell quicker. We need some hell fire preaching on repentance.

The was a portion of a video message preached by Leonard Ravenhill called, “Are We Longing For Repentance?”